Design Lessons from the D&D Next Playtest (Part 3)

The last post in this series examining the design overlap between tabletop roleplaying and strategy games will discuss the third installment of the Against the Slave Lords playtest from July 19 and podcast from July 23. Catch up on the first and second posts in the series if you missed them earlier. As always, we'll focus on interesting design decisions reached over the course of D&D Next playtest and how they might relate to more general design principles.

1. Expendable and constant-effect abilities need to be balanced carefully and in general, the formula of "effect equals probability times consequence" doesn't necessarily hold true. An effect that always works but is nominally less powerful is often more useful in practice than one that has a massive effect if successful but only a small chance of working. Therefore, effects that incorporate mechanical variance--die rolls, card draws, or whatever else--need to both be substantially powerful and have a way to mitigate that variance (or have a lesser effect even on a "failure") to be worth using in comparison to "always works" abilities.

The classic D&D example of this sort of balancing is the low-level wizard spell magic missile, which always works when it's used. Often, there's no need to use any other spell of the same level because magic missile is so reliable that it's automatically preferable--even if there are other spells that might be nominally more powerful. Among strategy games, Ascension does a pretty good job of constant-effect (construct)/expendable (hero) balancing: not only are construct effects not overwhelmingly powerful compared to heroes, but they do a good job of complementing hero abilities in creative ways.

2. The "flow" of a complex game has a large effect on its perceived complexity. Even though the same time might elapse over the course of one very long turn as in a few shorter turns, more shorter turns tend to feel faster as there's less time spent waiting for another action. There's an implication for actual complexity as well: fewer actions can be accomplished in a shorter turn than in a longer one, making turns more straightforward but at the potential cost of some strategic depth.

In both roleplaying games and strategy games, the best designs have enough turn-by-turn strategy that each turn features interesting and important decisions but little enough time between turns that time doesn't feel wasted. And regardless of how long a game actually takes, it's rare to walk away from the game wishing it had felt like it lasted longer. Rodney and Mike discuss this point in the context of a particularly climactic fight that took a few hours, but through sufficiently short turns to keep the action moving, the fight never felt bogged down yet offered enough complexity for the players to accomplish their goals.

3. Gaming should be fun. Always. It's a fitting point to end on because it's the most important design rule of all. Mechanical, strategic, and aesthetic considerations exist only to make the game more enjoyable. While designing a game, every decision should be made in the spirit of increasing how much fun the game will be to play.

Whodunnit? Post-Mortem

I've been missing the TV show The Mole for a long, long time. Since it seems like we'll probably never see another US season of it, my Mole withdrawal has sent me to the depths of streaming the Australian version from possibly legal websites... and watching Whodunnit?

Pitched as something between The Mole and Clue, Whodunnit was (ostensibly) about a closed-room murder mystery, where the killer was among the players, and the winner would be the one who unmasked the killer before he could himself be killed. It's a great idea, Agatha Christie meets reality television, but unfortunately Whodunnit fell far short of what it could have been. 

As a crime-themed reality show, perhaps the first game-show take on CSI, Whodunnit did a lot well. The idea to play at being crime scene investigators is novel and intriguing, and it was fascinating to see the meta-game emerge around the fourth week, where players began planning strategies around getting other players eliminated.

Evaluated as a game, though, Whodunnit's biggest flaw is that its narrative is about one thing (identifying a murderer) but its mechanics are about something else entirely (figuring out how the murders were committed). The winner won the game by being good at solving crimes, not by suspecting the correct person--in fact, his guess about the identity of the killer was wrong until the end. The analogy would be winning a game of Settlers of Catan without building any settlements, or Go without capturing any territory... and either of those two would be poorly designed games. Here are three ways Whodunnit could improve in terms of game design.

1. Better define the killer's in-game role. In The Mole, the job of the eponymous mole was simple: sabotage the game, but do it subtly, so that none of the other players catch on. In Whodunnit, it's much less clear what exactly the killer is supposed to be doing. Should the killer mislead the rest of the players so they couldn't solve the puzzles? Lie low and avoid detection? Put a lot of effort into the game and control the flow of information?

If yes to any of the above, the next question is why? What's in it for the killer to avoid being targeted (other than to maintain the conceit of the murder mystery)? Why does the killer care who stays, who gets killed, and who the other players suspect might be the killer? Aside from the psychological shock value, there's not much mechanical reason for the killer to be among the players at all.

Again drawing a (possibly unfair but probably inevitable) parallel to The Mole, players need the in-game chance to be able to say "hmm, person A acts so strange whenever circumstance X arises" or "isn't it funny how person B's team always performs the worst?" Giving the character of "the killer" a more defined relationship to the other players and to the events of the game ratchets up the tension and ensures that the players never stop wondering who the killer is.

2. Give the meta-puzzle some teeth. Whodunnit is--or should be--first and foremost a murder mystery, so the focus of the drama should be first and foremost on solving the mystery of who's committing the murders. But the day-to-day of Whodunnit is more often about the riddles and the manner in which each murder was committed. Geno might have said it best in a post-elimination interview: most of the time, it's more about the "how-dunnit".

The concept of Whodunnit made it seem like the weekly murder mysteries would eventually lead to identifying the killer. And how cool would it have been if there were a couple of random red herrings each week that, while totally irrelevant to solving a particular murder, gave some little hint about the killer? If the murder weapons or distribution of Scared cards encoded some pattern? If there were tiny clues scattered around the house that the players could find in their non-murder-solving free time? Or if the solution to each week's riddle provided a fragment of a larger meta-riddle that would reveal the killer's identity?

The idea here is to make the murder mystery something that can be solved instead of something whose solution will be revealed at some pre-determined point in the narrative.

3. Better integrate the murder mystery with the rest of the game. Once the killer's role is better delineated and the murder mystery is actually solvable on its own, the best improvement Whodunnit could make would be to give the identification of the killer some mechanical weight. To make one last comparison, the elimination quiz in The Mole is entirely centered around questions about the mole's identity, while by all accounts the Whodunnit quiz doesn't even ask about the killer's.

The Mole's system has a couple of intriguing strategic implications. Of course, it allows players more keyed in to who the mole is to remain in the game longer. But it's also useful in the metagame: as people get eliminated, their theories about who the mole is are likely to be the least correct, allowing the players still in the game to refine their own. No larger strategic plan is possible in Whodunnit. A player who is good at crime solving and plays the social game adeptly could accuse Giles the butler of being the killer every week and still win.


Other gamers and game designers seem to share the same critiques: the puzzling blog Clavis Cryptica has its own three criticisms of Whodunnit, which might sound a little familiar. Whodunnit was definitely worth watching, especially in the drought that is the summer television schedule. It might be worth watching again, now that it's clear that the real game is about crime-solving. Since it was pitched as who-dunnit, though, the game was disappointing in that the murder mystery carried basically no weight at all.

Design Lessons from the D&D Next Playtest (Part 2)

Continuing from last week's post, today we'll talk more about some of the design decisions made in the D&D Next open beta playtest and how they relate to strategy game design or design in general. This post will cover the live stream game from July 12 and the ensuing discussion on the July 18 podcast.

A well-designed game is reasonably intuitively able to be played even without looking at the rules. It's an interesting point, one that dovetails nicely from our recent discussions of approachability. Rodney and Mike assert that a marker of good game design is that if you open the box--literal for board games, more figurative for roleplaying games--you have at least some idea of how to play the game. You don't necessarily grasp all the complexities of the rules, and you certainly don't understand optimal strategies. But you have a decent idea of where pieces might go and how the board might look in its setup, early game, and end game.

There are two important implications of this design principle. First, it explains the enduring popularity of certain motifs in game design: moving spaces around a track by die rolls, winning tricks from hands of cards, completing sets of shapes or colors. Games that contain those elements make it relatively easy to predict the rules or gameplay just by looking at the parts. Second, making sure that games play the way you think they should play simply by looking at them removes barriers to approachability and encourages players to dive straight into the mechanics.

Two strategy games that do very good jobs of this intuitive leap into playing are Kingdom Builder and Carcassonne. Both games have boards that are easy to set up and pieces that clearly go places on those boards. If a new player opened the box to either game for the first time, she'd be able to reason through what the game was supposed to look and feel like almost immediately, even if she didn't instantly grasp the scoring or strategic nuances.

Mechanics should feel like tools in the hands of the players and not limitations. In some ways, this is an expansion of the previous point; if you feel like you should be able to do something in a game, the best games give you ways to do that. In roleplaying games, this is relatively simple: even if a situation isn't covered by the rules, the game master can pretty easily make a decision or institute a rule on the fly. For strategy games, though, rules tend to be harder coded, meaning good design requires a better forecasting of what naturally follows from a game's theme and mechanics.

For example, Settlers of Catan is about building a civilization, but it's not really a war or conquest game. There's no way to invade someone else's territory or steal their cities--but given the focus of the game, players don't really expect there to be, so it's not a limitation. At the same time, it does feel like there should be a way to defend your territory, which is why the knight/soldier card is so common. Settlers also handles resource trading exceptionally well, since it's natural for competing civilizations to want to specialize in what goods they produce. In contrast, when other resource management games that don't allow trading, that mechanic (or lack thereof) feels like an artificial limitation on something you'd naturally expect to be able to do. In this example, disallowing trading isn't necessarily a wrong design decision, but it's one that needs to make both mathematical and thematic sense before it's included in the game.

A game's numbers should mean something inside the game. Here's another nod toward theme, without which we'd just be throwing dice or drawing cards with increasingly abstract and complex rules constructions on top of them. Many, perhaps most, design decisions are made simply because it makes mechanical sense to do so. Maybe you draw three cards at the beginning of your turn to deplete the deck and to replenish your hand. That's fine; to be a good or even a great game, not every element of every turn needs to have deep thematic significance.

But it never hurts--and often greatly benefits--a game for its mechanics to have an in-universe, narrative reason to happen. In La Citta, citizens move from city to city because those citizens think they'll be better educated if they live elsewhere. In Tongiaki, ships sink if there aren't enough experienced captains among them to navigate the seas, and some routes are tougher than others. Perhaps Antoine Bauza designed 7 Wonders to have three ages because he thought that gave the right combination of brevity and strategic depth, but as a player, it's a lot more fun to think of it as pre-modern history getting divided into the ancient, classical, and medieval eras.

Next week, I'll be back with the third and (for now) final post in the series as the live stream game wraps up and the D&D design team offers its perspective on the game's conclusion.

2013 Fantasy Terrible Television

It is nearly that time of year again. Old friends reconvene like a cult at the end of each summer to draft from fan favorites and formulate a team made up of the very best. If you've been following this blog you've taken notice that we tend to have a similar ritual we handle in an unorthodox fashion.

Last year some of us cheered with Croatia and some of us laughed with the Arizona Cardinals but now we must create a new trend-setting fantasy league. Welcome to Fantasy Terrible Television.

The Objective

This September Americans will be exposed to a whole new round of entertainment options provided by television networks. Our mission is to determine the success rate of these new offerings even before the general population has seen them or the network executives can see the mistakes they have created.

Victory is determined only by a persons ability to judge how quickly a show will crash and burn. Can we predetermine a show that may be added to the Fantasy Terrible Television Hall of Fame of shows who have been cancelled after a single episode? 

The Guidelines

• We will have a draft to select available shows. Following the draft we can sit back and watch the season unfold.
• Shows will score based on news releases that affect their future status on air. There is a predetermined scoring criteria below.
• Shows can hurt your score. If it is announced that my show is getting an order for an additional season this will score against me.

The criteria for eligible shows:

• Series must start and finish between 8PM and 11PM
• Series must be scheduled to air on American Television, this includes all major networks, cable and premium channels but excludes any online-only content via Netflix, etc.

The scoring criteria:

• Shows are eligible to score from the moment they premiere until January 31st 2013.
• If a show is removed from primetime hours entirely it will be considered cancelled for scoring purposes.
• Shows that are returning to the Fall lineup are eligible to score additional bonuses. These are noted by "[1+ Season]".

Positive Scoring:

(+25 pts) - Show is cancelled (removed from air).

• (+1 pt) - per un-aired episode ordered
• (+8 pts) - per previous season [1+ Season]

(+15 pts) - Network issues surprising announcement that this will unceremoniously be the final season. [1+ Season Only]

(+10 pts) - Network announces the series will not be renewed.

(+5 pts) - Series moved mid-season to Friday or Saturday nights.

Negative Scoring:

(-10 pts) Season extended or given full order.

• (-1 pt) - per additional episode

(-10 pts) Series will be renewed for another season.

(-5 pts) Series moved mid-season to Thursday nights.

Bonus Scoring:

(+6 pts) First Strike - Series is first show cancelled or part of the first list of shows cancelled by a network. This is a separate bonus active for each individual network.

(+5 pts) Angus T. Jones - A lead actor or actress has a bizarre rant or controversy related to their show.

(+10 pts) Christina Applegate - A lead actor or actress leaves a show prior to any network announcement about the future of a series.

(+25 pts) Charlie Sheen - A lead actor or actress is contractually removed from a show prior to the end of the season.

Note: "Cancelled" in FTT scoring refers to shows that have been removed from the air with episodes that remain unaired. In general, all other uses of "Cancelled" should likely be interpreted as "Not Renewed".

Example Scoring from 2012-13 fall line-up:

You may vaguely remember the onslaught of advertisements NBC pushed for this show last summer during the Olympics. NBC thought a cute monkey could save its fall line-up but it was cancelled by November after only six episodes. 

Cancelled (+25 pts) 

Three un-aired episodes (+3 x 3 pts)

Total: 34 points

ABC originally put in an order for thirteen episodes. In November they announced the series would not be renewed but the remaining episodes would air as scheduled.

Network announces season not renewed (+10 pts)

Total: 10 points

After a relatively successful 2011-12 season, ABC gave it a second season. After a drop off in ratings it was cancelled in January with eight episodes remaining.

Cancelled (+25 pts)

Eight un-aired episodes (+1 x 8 pts)

One previous season on air (+8 pts)

Total: 41 points

Design Lessons from the D&D Next Playtest (Part 1)

As part of the ongoing playtest for the next edition of D&D, Wizards of the Coast's designers and developers have broadcast playtest sessions and recorded some fascinating podcasts delving into the design decisions underlying the current iteration's mechanics. While most of the discussion focuses on roleplaying games, and D&D in particular, there are a few principles discussed that are good points for game design in general. This is the first post in a series describing the application of the D&D Next design principles to strategy game design, covering the July 5th podcast and the June 28th live stream.

A mathematically perfect game is not the same thing as a perfect game particularly if it's not fun to play. This blog has covered design principles like approachability and theme quite a lot, and a game's aesthetics, mechanical flavor, and difficulty have just as profound an effect on a game's quality as how sound the scoring system is and how well the game scales for multiple players. If every die roll, card draw, or move of a token needs to be modified based on the number of players, the stage of the game, and the outcome of the previous turn to ensure mathematical balance, then you may have created an exquisitely designed game that nobody wants to play.

Good playtests operated in different "modes" to achieve different results. Most strategy game players and designers are familiar with "standard" play testing, where the game is played without a particular goal in mind, letting the action unfold and potentially confusing situations occur organically. Rodney Thompson and Mike Mearls describe a second "mode" of playtest, called a "stress test". A stress test strips away the theme, continuity, and other trappings, dealing only with the troublesome situations that showed up during the standard playtest. These trouble spots are worked through repeatedly and without context to smooth out the underlying math or contradictory rules.

Mechanics that tend to arise together should be analyzed together. Sometimes, mechanics that seem innocuous enough on their own can synergize in unexpected ways. In the podcast, Mike Mearls describes a monster that can make more attacks than an average monster, though its attacks are weaker. That's fine balance, except that the attacks can also cause paralysis; if an attack paralyzes its victim, the relative weakness of the remaining attacks is rendered moot because the victim is defenseless.

The situation described in the podcast is similar to my biggest critique of Seasons, a game I otherwise like very much. Plenty of cards in Seasons allow you to reduce the cost of paying for other cards--again, by itself, that's a fine mechanic, and it exists in probably every other resource-based card game from Magic: the Gathering to 7 Wonders. But in Seasons, the relative rarity or abundance of certain resources is a central mechanic. In effect, the "pay less cost" mechanic changes both the number and the rarity of the resources required because it doesn't discriminate among which type of resource you get a discount on. It's a subtle combinatorial effect, but a powerful one, and an unfortunate one because it skirts a central motif that most makes the game distinct from other tableau-builders.


It's fascinating so far to see roleplaying game and strategy game designers speaking so much of the same language and teaching so many of the same lessons, even if the application of those lessons is a bit different depending on the type of game being designed. And it's obvious that guys like Mike Mearls and Rodney Thompson are talented game designers in general, not merely roleplaying game designers, because they've capably balanced the need for strong narrative with the need for strong mechanics that is essential in a roleplaying game. Check back for discussions of the other podcasts in the series as we continue to explore the overlap between board game and roleplaying game design.

Action Economy in D&D Next

A few weekends ago, I finally fulfilled one of my long-standing gaming goals by playing in the D&D Next open beta as part of D&D Worldwide Game Day. As a roleplayer, I couldn't have been happier with the new rules--my wonderful and patient non-roleplayer girlfriend got to endure at least five minutes of me singing its praises.

Many of the mechanical and narrative high points in D&D Next are really only relevant in the context of roleplaying game design, but a few mechanics have some interesting implications for strategy game design too. In particular, the way that "actions" work in Next, sometimes called the "action economy," is vastly streamlined in comparison to D&D's earlier incarnations.

The 3rd Edition of the game, released in 2000, came with a veritable smorgasbord of them: standard, move, swift, immediate, full-round, free. 4th Edition kept most of them and added minor, interrupt, reaction, and the maddeningly vague "no action". Next simplifies things a lot. Most of those action types do indeed still exist in Next, but in keeping with the "modular" theme of the rules, not every action type is necessarily attached to every character, so the core rules don't assume every player needs to understand all the action types.

For example, the core rules account for exactly two "actions," the action (what used to be called the "standard action") and the move (which is no longer an action proper but a distance). Swift actions and reactions exist in Next, but not every character has something that can be accomplished in a swift action, so the swift action isn't described in the core rules. Instead, the description of how it works is included in every ability that needs it.

Going along with our recent discussions of complexity and approachability, the takeaway here for strategy game design is that if a game must be complex, it's better to move complexity to where it's required than to assert it in a game's basic rules. How many times have you unwrapped a new Euro-style board game to find a twenty-page manual describing every corner case of each rule variant that might exist but that doesn't tell you how to determine who goes first?

Of course, in designing a game, those rules variants and corner cases are important. It's essential to think about any situation that might possibly arise during both mechanical balancing and playtesting. But if a given piece of information is only relevant some of the time, the best games find ways to introduce that information when it is needed and not a moment sooner.

Quick Reviews 2nd Quarter 2013

I didn't get to try as many new games in the past three months as I would have liked, but I did get a few in. The following are my quick reviews, ordered from most anticipated to least anticipated. I hope to cover a few favorites in depth in the months to come.

Rarely do I feel a movie, TV show, book or game delivers on the hype I overhear before experiencing it for myself. But it sure feels great when it does.

The Resistance is more of an experience than a game, and that is the ultimate compliment. Five to Ten players act as a rebellious group attempting to undermine an oppressive government. Some of them however are spies attempting to work against the group. This game offers a simple rule set anyone can pick up in five minutes and forces the players to make each game an experience, full of double thinking, suspicion and empty offerings of trust.

I can't recommend it enough.

The Resistance Verdict: 10 out of 10

I remembered when Gra-Gra Company was originally brought to the US by Z-Man Games in and thus when I saw the re-titled Stack Market at a discount retailer for under $4 I figured it was worth a try.

Players stack wooden dice into buildings that represent their growing investments in companies and are rewarded for increasing the height these buildings and punished when a building collapses.

There are some interesting ideas as two people can be working on the same building at once and players can switch buildings at the end of their turn. The problems are insurmountable though as the rules are clunky (the average player is likely to end up with less money than the started the game with) and it lacked the hold-your-breath anticipation and fun of a game like Jenga. I'm glad I gave it a try but it simply won't be revisited by me anytime soon.

Stack Market Verdict: 5 out of 10

We shouldn't judge a book by its cover and neither should we judge a game. But abstracts can often be the worst offenders as they lack any imaginative presentation. I gave Atoll a try simply because it puts in the effort to make the game play intuitive and easier on the eyes.

If you look a the board to your left and took a guess  as to how it is played you'd probably come pretty close. Something should be said for the importance of graphic design for this month's topic of approachability. Players take either black or white pieces and alternate turns in order to strategically place their pieces to connect to diametrically opposed sides on their color in one continuous line.

It has some interesting ideas in regards to blocking your opponent and requires the forethought to think many turns ahead. This is a quality abstract, but unfortunately it just isn't for me.

Atoll Verdict: 4.5 out of 10

After Atoll I gave another abstract a shot, this time with a light theme called Tricky Safari. Players move their camera (the red or yellow piece in the lower left and upper right corners in the picture) orthogonality or diagonally around the board to capture photos of each of the area's diverse species.

Players each take one turn trying to position themselves in front of (relative to the animal's arrow) or beside an animal, scoring up to one point per animal. After each has taken a turn, all ten animals move forward, with delicate rules in place in cases where they run into water spaces or brush.

Tricky Safari really grew on me as I became more impressed with each game. A good player has to think not only about this turn but similar to billiards, how they will set themselves up for the next turn. I'd guess this might be a tedious game to play in person (constantly moving ten neutral pieces) but it is a wonderful little abstract available on Yourturnmyturn.

Tricky Safari Verdict: 7 out of 10